Tech Tuesdays: Comparing Apples to Ice Cream

From a young age, I was immersed in and surrounded by some of the newest, geekiest tech toys available. My mom would lean towards function over form while my dad was a fan of having the latest and greatest of everything – from new Movie formats, an upgraded OS, the latest in cordless Home Phone and cell phone technology.

I grew up on the Mac II, playing around with MineSweeper, Creative Writer, KidPix, Pipe Dreams and Lemmings when most kids were playing with dolls.At the age of 7, my dad brought home our first – and only – Laser Disc player. In middle school, I was lucky enough to get an iMac. I got my first mp3 player soon after and essentially played hotpotato with various iPods into my college life. When the iMac was scrapped for parts, I inherited a Mac Sawtooth G4 and after that the shiny new iMac that I have today but I couldn’t fully escape the grasp of the PC. In college, I honed in on my love of numbers, data and code and eventually switched my major to Statistical Science. My new coursework relied heavily on applications that were PC only, so eventually I became proficient in both operating systems.

I got my first cell phone before I got my first car; it was an ugly brick of a phone but it did the trick. It maybe had a game on it, six obnoxious stock ringtones and limited, if any, texting capabilities. When I was 17 I upgraded to a smaller brick – and slowly, but surely I started climbing that magical cell phone ladder. In college, I upgraded to an LG Flip Phone that changed color on the front panel; it might not seem so cool now, but back then it was the business. I had a Chocolate until it fell apart on me, literally. I thought about getting an iPhone but I have to be honest – at the time it seemed like a glorified, overpriced iPhone and I wanted nothing to do with it. So when HTC started rolling out Android phones, I was thrilled. I started with an Incredible, then the Incredible 2 and finally – my precious Rezound. One of the best things about this model is the sleek GUI and design interface.

A few days ago, the Ice Cream Sandwich update was pushed through to my phone; I was stoked! It was honestly like having a brand new phone to play around with. Here are some of the changes that I noticed, and a helpful little trick.

The best aspect of the Ice Cream update is the locked dock at the bottom of the screen. Before the update, I had my favorite applications on the lock menu and the rest posted all over the home screen for easy reference. The new dock not only lets you keep those precious applications at your fingertips, but you can choose between having one or many in one location by simply dragging and dropping one over the other.

Trick: To take screen shots on older HTC models, you either had do download and pay for a 3rd party application or go through the painstaking task of rooting your Droid. One of the things I absolutely about the Rezound is being able to take screen shots on the fly. If you didn’t know you had this feature and wanted to test it out, follow these super simple steps:

Go to the main screen of the Rezound

Press gently on the Power Button, holding it halfway down

Tap the Home Icon

Your screen should immediately flash to white and a text box saying “Screenshot saved to Camera shots” will pop up on the bottom of the screen.

Tip:

Toggling this button may seem like a good idea:

I’ll save battery life! My applications will boot faster!WRONG.

I’ve had issues with previous phones and what happened seemed like a horrible flashback: every time I closed out of an application the HTC Menu would reboot. Being the proud owner of now several HTC phones, I thought I was starting an infinite Boot Loop.

Thank goodness I wasn’t, but I got scared for a second! I’d much rather use this Advanced Task Killer application and save myself the heart attacks.